Smoke and Mirrors

“You should have called the front desk. They’d’ve sent you down a heater and extra blankets.”

“It never occurred to me.”

His breathing sounded awkward, labored.

“You okay?”

“Heck no. I’m old. You get to my age, boy, you won’t be okay either. But I’ll be here when you’ve gone. How’s work going?”

“I don’t know. I’ve stopped working on the treatment, and I’m stuck on ‘The Artist’s Dream’—this story I’m doing about Victorian stage magic. It’s set in an English seaside resort in the rain. With the magician performing magic on the stage, which somehow changes the audience. It touches their hearts.”

He nodded, slowly. “‘The Artist’s Dream’ . . . ” he said. “So. You see yourself as the artist or the magician?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I’m either of them.”

I turned to go and then something occurred to me.

“Mister Dundas,” I said. “Have you got a screenplay? One you wrote?” He shook his head.

“You never wrote a screenplay?”

“Not me,” he said.

“Promise?”

He grinned. “I promise,” he said.

I went back to my room. I thumbed through my U.K. hardback of Sons of Man and wondered that anything so clumsily written had even been published, wondered why Hollywood had bought it in the first place, why they didn’t want it, now that they had bought it.

I tried to write “The Artist’s Dream” some more, and failed miserably. The characters were frozen. They seemed unable to breathe, or move, or talk.

I went into the toilet, pissed a vivid yellow stream against the porcelain. A cockroach ran across the silver of the mirror.

I went back into the sitting room, opened a new document, and wrote:

I’m thinking about England in the rain,

a strange theatre on the pier: a trail

of fear and magic, memory and pain.

The fear should be of going bleak insane,

the magic should be like a fairytale.

I’m thinking about England in the rain.

The loneliness is harder to explain—

an empty place inside me where I fail,

of fear and magic, memory and pain.

I think of a magician and a skein

of truth disguised as lies. You wear a veil.

I’m thinking about England in the rain . . .

The shapes repeat like some bizarre refrain

and here’s a sword, a hand, and there’s a grail

of fear and magic, memory and pain.

The wizard waves his wand and we turn pale,

tells us sad truths, but all to no avail.

I’m thinking about England, in the rain

of fear and magic, memory and pain.

I didn’t know if it was any good or not, but that didn’t matter. I had written something new and fresh I hadn’t written before, and it felt wonderful.

I ordered breakfast from room service and requested a heater and a couple of extra blankets.

The next day I wrote a six-page treatment for a film called When We Were Badd, in which Jack Badd, a serial killer with a huge cross carved into his forehead, was killed in the electric chair and came back in a video game and took over four young men. The fifth young man defeated Badd by burning the original electric chair, which was now on display, I decided, in the wax museum where the fifth young man’s girlfriend worked during the day. By night she was an exotic dancer.

The hotel desk faxed it off to the studio, and I went to bed.

I went to sleep, hoping that the studio would formally reject it and that I could go home.

In the theater of my dreams, a man with a beard and a baseball cap carried on a movie screen, and then he walked off-stage. The silver screen hung in the air, unsupported.

A flickery silent film began to play upon it: a woman who came out and stared down at me. It was June Lincoln who flickered on the screen, and it was June Lincoln who walked down from the screen and sat on the edge of my bed.

“Are you going to tell me not to give up?” I asked her.

On some level I knew it was a dream. I remember, dimly, understanding why this woman was a star, remember regretting that none of her films had survived.

She was indeed beautiful in my dream, despite the livid mark which went all the way around her neck.

“Why on earth would I do that?” she asked. In my dream she smelled of gin and old celluloid, although I do not remember the last dream I had where anyone smelled of anything. She smiled, a perfect black-and-white smile. “I got out, didn’t I?” Then she stood up and walked around the room.

“I can’t believe this hotel is still standing,” she said. “I used to f**k here.” Her voice was filled with crackles and hisses. She came back to the bed and stared at me, as a cat stares at a hole.

“Do you worship me?” she asked.

I shook my head. She walked over to me and took my flesh hand in her silver one.

“Nobody remembers anything anymore,” she said. “It’s a thirty-minute town.”

There was something I had to ask her. “Where are the stars?” I asked. “I keep looking up in the sky, but they aren’t there.”

She pointed at the floor of the chalet. “You’ve been looking in the wrong places,” she said. I had never before noticed that the floor of the chalet was a sidewalk and each paving stone contained a star and a name—names I didn’t know: Clara Kimball Young, Linda Arvidson, Vivian Martin, Norma Talmadge, Olive Thomas, Mary Miles Minter, Seena Owen . . .

June Lincoln pointed at the chalet window. “And out there.” The window was open, and through it I could see the whole of Hollywood spread out below me—the view from the hills: an infinite spread of twinkling multicolored lights.

“Now, aren’t those better than stars?” she asked.

And they were. I realized I could see constellations in the street lamps and the cars.

I nodded.

Her lips brushed mine.

“Don’t forget me,” she whispered, but she whispered it sadly, as if she knew that I would.

I woke up with the telephone shrilling. I answered it, growled a mumble into the handpiece.

“This is Gerry Quoint, from the studio. We need you for a lunch meeting.

Mumble something mumble.

“We’ll send a car,” he said. “The restaurant’s about half an hour away.”

The restaurant was airy and spacious and green, and they were waiting for me there.

By this point I would have been surprised if I had recognized anyone. John Ray, I was told over hors d’oeuvres, had “split over contract disagreements,” and Donna had gone with him, “obviously.”